This is it. No more talk. No more guessing. No more blogging. We’re going to find out if all the work for the last four months –and the last 6 years– have paid off. Colin and I will be meeting up to tackle the Vermont Marathon. The goal? Qualify for the Boston Marathon. Here’s the run down.

Alright folks. No more messing around. The biggest race of my running life is a week away. I’ve been training like crazy. I’ve been tracking the weather (like crazy). I’ve

already picked out my race attire. Now it’s time to make some internal changes. It’s time to get serious.

From now until the race I’m going to be strictly monitoring my

diet. So far, alcohol, large amounts of dairy, and overly greasy food are off the table. Beans? No thanks. Broccoli? Apparently not. Gluten and caffeine are going to be severely limited too, though not cut out completely. I plan to eat lots of oatmeal, bananas, rice, fish, potatoes, and chicken.

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p style=”text-align: left;”>Besides diet, I’m also going to do my best to get more sleep. My current 6 hours per night average isn’t cutting it. Basically my plan is to adopt a bland, responsible, adult lifestyle for the next week. I know they say don’t change anything you haven’t practiced, but I can’t imagine that applies to dropping bad habits. I guess we’ll find out! Until then we’ll be all serious all the time.

My last long run is in the books.  17 miles (well, 16.3).  56 miles last week.  Two weeks to go.  Things are starting to get real.  Friday and Saturday served up back-to-back hard runs and my body exceeded expectations.  Friday I crushed a hard tempo workout.  Saturday was all kinds of hills and speed.  Both were fantastic.  All in all, I’m feeling strong right now.

On the flip side, the weather forecast is playing some sick joke on me.  When I first started tracking it on May 7th, everything looked amazing!  Like, too good to be true.  Well, I guess it was because a few days later, it skyrockeded 20 degrees to near-Austin temperatures.  Like any good runner, I started moping.  But!  Yesterday things took a turn for the best!  Inexplicably the race day high dropped 20 degrees again back down to darn-near perfect.  Yay!  Or so I thought.  Today, whoever fudged the keyboard yesterday figured it out, and updated the race day weather back up to 83 degrees.  Sigh.

No matter!  My recent hard workouts were awesome and the weather here was the same as the current race predictions.  I’m feeling good.  There’s still a lot of time until race day, but I think we can do this!

As any marathon runner can tell you, tapering (the last couple weeks of a training plan where mileage and intensity decrease), can make you a little stir crazy.  For months and months any extra energy you might have gets immediately exhausted during the next training run.  So when the running decreases, the excess time and energy increases, which can be a dangerous thing.  You start to notice a little ache here or pain there that you’re pretty sure wasn’t there yesterday.

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We’re inside 3 weeks until the Vermont Marathon. To catch people up, I plan to qualify for the Boston Marathon by running

sub-3:05 in Vermont. I thought it might be helpful to at least one person (everyone counts!) to compile all Vermont-related posts into one place. So here is a list of all of my Vermont coverage from the beginning.

Race Report!

Race Preview

Let’s Get Serious

Status Check: 13 Days to go

Status Check: 19 Days to go

Weather Tracker

Training Begins

The Training Plan

Signing Up

It’s no secret I’ve been working hard to prepare myself to qualify for the Boston Marathon by running under 3:05 at the Vermont Marathon. Part of my hard work has been to control as much as possible. One notoriously elusive variable has been the weather, which despite my best efforts, won’t do exactly what I want just because I say so. Thus, I’ve been doing the next best thing. Since the beginning of my taper three weeks before race day (May 7th), I’ve been checking the laughably long-term forecast for Burlington, Vermont each day. Here’s where things stand:

So that’s what the temperature has been predicted to be on May 27th over the last 21 days… neurotic? yes no. I call it thorough. I’ll be updating this daily until race

day.

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p>*Weather.com and Wunderground are not so foolhardy as to try to predict the weather 3+ weeks out. I like Accuweather’s chutzpah./

I just kicked off my first week of marathon training for Vermont!  So far we’re rocking the schedule.  8 miles, 12 miles, 5 miles, 9 miles.  That’s the first four days (out of six).  The crazy part about this schedule is that this week will finish up with 55 miles.  That’s where the peak of my previous training planned topped out.  It’ll be a delicate balance between increasing mileage and staying away from injury.